Vista slowly continues its growth
Linux more aggressive than Mac OS during the summer

7 months after its launch, the new version of Windows is taking, little by little, its place within its family. The visit share of Mac OS is stable compared with January whereas Linux knows a slight increase.

Perimeter:

Study conducted from to 1st January to 31 August 2007

Perimeter of 136,601 websites

In August 2007, more than 6 visits out of 100 were made with Vista…

Since its launch at the end of January 2007 for the general public, Windows Vista regularly wins ground faced with other operating systems.

In order to analyse the extent of Vista’s progression, in the graph below we compared Vista’s visit shares with those of XP over the months following their respective launches (30 January 2007 for Vista and 25 October 2001 for XP).

There is no denying that Vista is not very far ahead… Seven months after its launch, Windows XP thus made a little over 15% of the Web visits vs. “only” 6.48% for Vista. Certainly, we can consider that the context is different: XP took over from more or less competitive versions (Windows 98, Millennium) and was launched at the end of the year, a more prosperous period for PC sales. Vista finally took over from an XP version rather well in place… so why change if one is not buying a new PC?

Lets now interest ourselves in the repercussions of the development of Vista on the share of other Windows versions.

The visit shares of the different Windows versions within the visits of this operating system’s family are represented below.

The visit share of Windows XP on the totality of Windows visits diminishes each month since January 2007, in proportions that remain, however, little important:

Windows XP, the most used version, thus attains 87.8% of the Windows visits in August vs. 90.5% in April and 91.8% in January.

Out of the totality of the visits of the Windows family, the share of the versions other than XP continue to diminish, with the exception of Windows 2003 of which the share (very confidential) stabilises:

Windows 2000 attains 2.84% of the Windows visits in August 2007 vs. 4.10% in January 2007,

Windows 98: 0.99% of the Windows visits in August 2007 vs. 1.89% in January 2007,

Windows Millennium: 0.41% of the Windows visits in August 2007 vs. 0.64% in January 2007,

Windows 2003: 0.41% of the Windows visits in August 2007 (like in June and July) vs. 0.37% in January 2007.

… i.e. already two times more than Mac OS

The summer 2007 didn’t shake up the operating systems market, still dominated by Windows with 95.5% of the visits for the month of August. Mac OS, loyal second, shows 3.2% of the visits and Linux completes this trio with 0.8% of the visits.

At the family level of operating systems and over a vision of 8 months, the visit share of Windows is in very slight decline, whereas Mac OS is stable and Linux defends itself well:

95.47% for Windows in August 2007 vs. 95.64% in January 2007 (-0.17 points in visit shares). After a drop from March to June, its visit share nonetheless picked up again in July.

3.23% for Mac OS in August like in January 2007. After a progression from March to May, the visit share of Mac OS diminished somewhat during the summer, although its X Intel version continues its growth.

0.81% for Linux in August 2007 vs. 0.73% in January 2007 (+0.08 points).

Consoles remain in 4th place with 0.08% of the visits in August 2007: 0.03% for the PSP, 0.02% for the Wii and also 0.02% for the PS3.

Windows Vista has just passed the 6% use mark. Controversial, notably at the levels of its weight and its instability, how far will the latest version of Windows go? Some already speak of Vista as an intermediary version before the arrival in 2010 of Windows Seven, the new generation of OS…

Rendezvous in the coming months on XiTi Monitor in order to follow its development.

Methodology:

This study on operating systems was carried out on the francophone websites.